Beach

               


The Forester squinted in the sunlight. His eyes, after twenty five days in the catacombs, refused to get accustomed to the sun. He couldn't get a glimpse through shaking, teary, stuck together eyelashes, and when, by some miracle, he finally did, the  light sliced at his eyeballs like a perfectly well sharpened knife of a professional cook, and he hurriedly shut them again with mild  astonishment.

He considerd going back in the hole - in his business standing around with eyes closed was probably the fastest way to get killed - but just the thought of wet, rotten murkiness and vague but everpresent smell of decomposing flesh and squelching of bugs in the walls made him change his mind.

He figured out what it was that was worrying him - there was no gunfire. He joked to himself that the reason why he was still alive was that the pilot probably was looking at him thinking"Whisky Tango Foxtrot", his fingers busy pinching and off the joystick trigger, but it still unsettled him. His whole being, every cell in his body screamed: "Run for cover, hide, behind the corner, duck!" and he would have done so if not for realization that if he were to run with eyes closed he's probably walk right off some cliff of smash headfirst into a rock.

He didn't know how long he stood there, motionless, when a cry of a seagull entered his head. This was so unexpected and so utterly and completely absurd that without thiking about it he opened his eyes. What he saw then appeared every time he closed his eyes eversince.

He was standing on a mountain highway which ran along the sea coast and in the distance hot air was rising over asphalt, making the lighthouse just over half a mile away seem a mirage. There was a beach with honey-coloured sand, and suddenly he knew, and the knowledge was irrefutable to him, that if he were to step on the sand, it would envelop his foot and feel warm and and wecloming and nice, and that resonated with the feeling of a girl, in another life, taking his hand.

The seagull kept calling to him overhead, and for a moment he saw himself from above, legs digging into the ground, ready to run, all his protective gear on, sweating, suit closing access to warm wind to his skin, closing in, tightening on his pulsating neck, his hands clutching guns spread for balance, as if walking a tightrope or trying to stay upright on the deck of a ship in the storm that was about to buck up and hit him on the head -- and around him not a thing moved.

Some time later - there was no telling how long - the sun was halfway down and it was coming to the end of the day. And it was quiet. There was just the constant whooshing of the sea, and nothing else. A ladybird landed on the glove of his suit and started cleaning her wings. He looked at it, completely dumbfounded, and felt something he wasn't registering before - a gust of warm wind blew over and around him and he was suddenly aware that it wasn't just him anymore, but the road, the wind, burnt-out cars on the sides, the sea, all the peculiar creatures in it, and the bird's eye view, and the cosmos above it that he couldn't see but he knew was there with its brilliant stars and darkest darkness he's ever seen - it was all part of something and it was all connnected and now he was connected to it too.

And as he collapsed onto the ground weeping, he understood it all. All things.